It Could Work! But Should We Build It?
An MCP server, a secure tunnel, and a personal access token. What could go wrong? A Halloween horror story about shadow IT and security.
Practical .NET and cloud architecture
I write about ASP.NET Core, AWS, APIs, testing, infrastructure, and developer tooling, grounded in problems I encounter while building real systems.
Recent posts
Beyond faster code: AI and the engineering we could be doing
AI doesn’t just make writing code cheaper. It can also make architectural exploration cheaper, letting us investigate questions we previously wouldn’t have had time to pursue.
GitHub repositories are infrastructure too
Managing roughly 25 GitHub repositories was becoming a maintenance problem. Here’s how a growing script turned into Octosmith, a declarative tool for aligning repository configuration without requiring uniformity.
Juniors should optimize for growth, not just productivity
Early-career developers can easily mistake short-term productivity for progress. Growing into a senior also requires context, relationships, judgment, and exposure to how experienced engineers think.
Using AutoFixture and Bogus to keep tests expressive
AutoFixture composes the test context. Bogus makes generated data easier to describe.
Contract-first APIs are about collaboration, not YAML
Contract-first API design is less about writing YAML first and more about making a shared boundary explicit before implementation decisions harden. This post looks at why that matters when one service is consumed by several independently...
How AI made my writing process faster without lowering the bar
AI helped me publish far more frequently by removing friction from how I develop and refine ideas, while keeping the filters, structure, and review that determine whether a post is worth publishing.
Using AutoFixture to keep unit tests focused on the scenario
A unit test should show what makes its scenario special. AutoFixture can provide a valid context by default so the Arrange phase only needs to describe the difference.
Composing focused Refit clients behind one connector
Keep Refit clients focused by responsibility while exposing one convenient dependency to the rest of the application.
I wanted to automate a tweet. I ended up building an event runtime
A small publishing automation started with Jekyll’s stateless builds and somehow ended with a generic event routing runtime.